Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?

Deindustrialization in the United States has triggered record-setting joblessness in manufacturing centers from Detroit to Baltimore. At the same time, global competition and technological change have actually stimulated both new businesses and new jobs. The jury is still out, however, on how many of these positions represent a significant source of long-term job quality and security. Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? addresses the most pressing questions for today’s workers: whether the U.S. labor market can still produce jobs with good pay and benefits for the majority of workers and whether these jobs can remain stable over time. What constitutes a “good” job, who gets them, and are they becoming more or less secure? Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? examines U.S. job quality and volatility from the perspectives of both workers and employers. The authors analyze the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the book covers data for twelve states during twelve years, 1992–2003, resulting in an unprecedented examination of workers and firms in several industries over time. Counter to conventional wisdom, the authors find that good jobs are not disappearing, but their character and location have changed. The market produces fewer good jobs in manufacturing and more in professional services and finance. Not surprisingly, the best jobs with the highest pay still go to the most educated workers. The most vulnerable workers—older, low-income, and low-skilled—work in the most insecure environments where they can be easily downsized or displaced by a fickle labor market. A higher federal minimum wage and increased unionization can contribute to the creation of well paying jobs. So can economic strategies that help smaller metropolitan areas support new businesses. These efforts, however, must function in tandem with policies that prepare workers for available positions, such as improving general educational attainment and providing career education. Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? makes clear that future policies will need to address not only how to produce good jobs but how to produce good workers. This cohesive study takes the necessary first steps with a sensible approach to the needs of workers and the firms that hire them.

Contents

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction and Background

The combination of inequality and volatility that characterizes the U.S.
labor market has clearly generated a great deal of insecurity, even among
currently employed Americans. They worry about when they might lose
their jobs, how they might sustain themselves and their families during a...

Chapter 3: Job Quality and Volatility: How Do They Affect Worker Earnings?

In the previous chapter, we showed that high-quality jobs are still relatively
available in the United States, though apparently less so than before
for workers with lower levels of education or skill. This relative change in
the availability of good jobs for less-skilled workers could have important...

Chapter 4: Job Quality and Volatility in Metropolitan Areas: A Tale of Two (Kinds of) Cities

The previous two chapters have demonstrated the importance of job
quality in U.S. labor markets and indicated that the access of less-skilled
workers to high-quality jobs might be diminishing over time. Job volatility
can also have either positive or negative impacts on workers, depending...

Chapter 5: Good Jobs and Firm Dynamics

“A giant sucking sound” was the way Ross Perot described the effect of
globalization on middle-income American jobs during the 1982 presidential
election. The alleged vanishing of well-paid jobs has been a theme of
newspaper and magazine articles ever since. These concerns make sense...

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Policy Implications

What have we learned about long-term trends in job quality and volatility
in the previous chapters, and what do these findings imply for trends
in inequality and insecurity among workers in the United States? What
kinds of good jobs are growing in this country, and who is getting them?...

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